Raveonettes: Grave-Pop Serenades

Raveonettes frontman/guitarist Sune Rose Wagner wants to
seduce you, lure you in, lull you into a false sense of pop-melodic
security so strong that you don’t notice the darkness until
it’s too late. And that’s been the MO for him and his Raveonettes
counterpart, singer/bassist Sharin Foo, from their acclaimed 2002
debut, Whip It On all the way to this year’s Raven in the Grave.

“It’s like when you meet new people,” Wagner explains,
“You see them from the outside and you have a certain
notion of what they’re about, but you don’t really know what
lurks behind there. Sometimes it’s nice to make music that’s
incredibly appealing and almost sweet and very innocent
sounding, but then when you read the words you figure out
that this has nothing to do with innocence.”

Wagner onstage with his
Japanese-made Fender
Ventures
Jazzmaster at the Bowery Ballroom
in New
York City on March
26, 2008. The guitar has become
Wagner’s favorite because “It
doesn’t have all the s
witches that
a normal Jazzmaster has, and it
feels a little
bit heavier. It feels
like one of those guitars
that you
can really travel
with and nothing
will break it.”

Wagner’s sinister slyness may be the perfect description of the
Raveonettes and what makes their unique brand of atmospheric,
melodic indie rock so consistently appealing. It’s an artful blend
of pop hooks, effect-laden walls of sound à la Phil Spector, and
dark-side-of-the-street lyrics that could easily have come from
the mind of David Lynch, Rimbaud, or… well, Phil Spector.
But, in fact, it all came from Denmark.

Roots of the Rave
Wagner and Foo met in Copenhagen and were immediately drawn to
each other by their shared fondness for the Everly Brothers. Foo came
from a musical family and grew up surrounded by music. “My very first
instrument was actually piano when I was like 7 years old,” she remembers.
“That was what I started out with. My dad was a guitar player,
so there were lots of guitars at home—and keyboards and pianos and
4-track and 8-track recorders. There was always that element around.”

Wagner, on the other hand, was lured to the guitar at age 15
after seeing a Dire Straits concert on television. He soon branched
out, drawing inspiration from great players in a wide range of
genres. “Back in the day, it was mostly a lot of blues—a lot of
Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters and B.B. King and stuff like
that. And then, gradually, I got into players like Jimi Hendrix. I
was always a huge Randy Rhoads fan and a huge Jimmy Page fan,
as well. Those were the big influences when I was growing up.”

But Wagner also developed a love of melodic songs by bands like
the Jesus and Mary Chain and the Velvet Underground, and through
them he discovered the classic sounds of the 1950s and early ’60s.
“I think there’s a certain vibe to the music that I like,” Wagner says.
“Sometimes it’s like an innocent or nostalgic feeling, but the main
reason is because a lot of it is really good songwriting by really good
performers—y’know, great singers, great players. It’s always been
appealing to me when people can really play their instruments.”

When Foo first met Wagner, she was deeply absorbed in the
Danish jazz scene. “I was in the conservatory circuit, which was
more the jazz cats, and there were some incredible musicians. So I
was going out a lot late at night, listening to and watching a lot of
jam sessions—but not participating that much, because I’ve always
been completely intimidated by jam sessions.”

But under Foo’s cool jazz-cat exterior beat the burning heart of
a true rocker, and it didn’t take long for Wagner to lure her into
the indie-rock scene. “It was kind of a new place,” she recalls, “but
I felt very comfortable there because my heart really did belong to
the Stones, the Velvet Underground, and Bob Dylan. I was finding
the place that I felt very comfortable.”

From the beginning, the two found working together completely
natural. Their shared enthusiasm for old-school rock ’n’ roll gave
them plenty of common ground, and they soon found they also had
a knack for lush vocal harmonies. “When we started out, we talked a
lot about being inspired by the vocals of the Everly Brothers and how
seamlessly they sing together and how extremely fluid and eloquent it
is,” Foo explains. “Right when we started singing together, it was just
a very organic thing. We would record stuff and say, ‘Who sang that?
Was that you or me?’ Sometimes we couldn’t hear if it was a guy or a
girl, and we were getting into that ... I wouldn’t say androgynous, but
that weird place where you can’t tell if it’s a boy or a girl.”

A Constant Metamorphosis
Wagner and Foo’s partnership bore fruit in the form of their first EP,
Whip It On, which was named Best Rock Album of the Year at the
2003 Danish Music Awards. One notable aspect of the album was
that Wagner set an interesting and deceptively simple challenge—
each song could have no more than three chords, and all had to be
in the key of Bb minor. Their follow-up and first full-length album,
Chain Gang of Love, was all in Bb major. These seemingly draconian
limitations were inspired by the Dogme 95 school of filmmaking
started by Danish director Lars Von Trier, and Wagner insists that
the effect was anything but stifling. “It was actually really great,” he
says, “because it made me incredibly inspired, and I really had to
be on top of my game to make songs that still sounded interesting
while not using a lot of things that people normally do.”

Rubbing the soapbars,
Foo brings the noise at
the Siren Music Festival
on July 18, 2009.

The Raveonettes’ 2005 album, Pretty in Black continued the
pattern of mixing retro elements with the band’s noise-pop aesthetic,
including with help from guest artists Ronnie Spector,
Velvet Underground drummer Maureen Tucker, and Martin Rev
of Suicide. The dirtier, noisier sounding Lust, Lust, Lust followed in
2007, with Wagner and Foo opting to tour as an acoustic duo to
support the album. In fact, they’ve frequently changed their touring
lineup over the years. For Wagner, that tactic is another way to stay
inspired. “Sometimes it’s just Sharin and me, just the two of us,” he
says. “So we like to mix it up. That’s the fun part—we can pick and
choose every time we do a new tour how we feel like doing it.”

On 2009’s In and Out of Control, Wagner and Foo mixed it
up in a new way by collaborating with Danish pop star Thomas
Troelsen, who co-wrote seven of the album’s 11 tracks and took on
production chores. The result was a more polished effort than Lust,
Lust, Lust, with two of the album's songs being featured on the
popular cable show Gossip Girl.

For their latest creation, Raven in the Grave, the Raveonettes have
changed the formula yet again. The ’50s-style sounds that have been
so prominent on their past records have in large part been replaced
with dark, ambient washes of guitar and keyboards that seem to
swirl around you. “We always try to make very cinematic music,
because we’re big fans of film scores and movies,” says Wagner. “A
lot of the lyrical content on this album wouldn’t have fit very well
had it been more of a surfy kind of vibe—it just wouldn’t have been
powerful enough. So it was nice to move away from that a little bit
and make something that’s more un-surfy and un-twangy.”

But Wagner remains the ever-restless artist, already anticipating—
albeit humorously—another stylistic about-face. “Right
after you finish the album you immediately think ‘This is a great
album.’ I’m very proud of it, but now I really want to make a
100-percent surf album with eight Jazzmasters and more twang
than anyone has heard before,” Wagner laughs.

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